The Merriam Webster dictionary defines beauty as “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit”.
I did have to look for a while through definitions that went beyond just being aesthetically pleasing(usually with reference to a woman), or the colloquial notion of “a brilliant, extreme, or egregious example or instance”.
So how can there be a discussion around beauty and birth? Can birth be an aggregate of things that gives pleasure to the senses and exalts the mind and spirit?
It was when I was conducting the research component of my masters qualification that women started speaking about beauty and birth, and why that was important to them.
I was struck at the time, that none of the literature concerning birth that I was reading even had a vague notion of beauty being involved with birth. This was a wholly birthing women’s perspective that had been untouched and unrecognised by the systems of maternity or obstetric care that women engage with in pregnancy and birth.
The women I interviewed spoke about wanting a beautiful birth. This was sometimes described in terms of the environment they wanted to create when giving birth. It was important for them to be able to choose the space they welcomed their baby into with elements like dim lighting, soft music of their choice, use of essential oils or scents, and comfortable bedding and pillows and clothing. Being able to be surrounded by special items that women felt brought them comfort during birth was mentioned a number of times. The creation of a beautiful environment for birth also encompassed the people who would be in that created space including partners and care providers.
The reasons why women wanted this beauty surrounding them during birth was both simple and yet complex. There was the strong sense that they would labour and birth “well” in this cocoon they had created, and that they would feel safe and that the feeling of safety would, in turn, support the best physiology for birth. It dawned on me during these discussions that the creation of this beautiful space to give birth in, equated to safety for these women.
But there was more about the importance of beauty in birth that was uncovered. These women wanted to be able to say that they had a beautiful birth. They wanted a beautiful experience of bringing their baby into the world. An experience that they would recall with joy and pleasure and love and pride. And they wanted their baby to be born into a beautiful environment infused with love and comfort and peace, and for those elements to be the things that greeted their baby when they came into the world.
These discussions of women’s need for beauty in birth were absent from the scientific literature that determines birth practises in institutional care, and yet the desire for a beautiful birth was defined as a key theme of what underpinned the choices concerning birth for this group of women.
So I’m raising this as a topic for discussion here and now. You may not have considered beauty as something that you want to think about in relation to birth, but I invite you to give it some space and time to explore now. What would a beautiful birth look and feel like for you?
